"The Ends of Critique re-examines the stakes of critique in the 21st century. In view of increasingly complex socio-political realities and shifts in a fully globalized world, the roles and manners of critique also change. The volume offers an unprecedented re-examination of critique under those conditions of global entanglement and asymmetrical relations from a diversity of scholarly perspectives within the humanities. All contributions move the notion of critique into more diverse traditions than the Eurocentric, Kantian tradition and emphasize the need to attend to a plurality of critical perspectives. The volume's reflections move critique toward a situated, perspectival, and entangled critical stance, with interventions from decolonial and systemic, deconstructive and (post)human(ist) perspectives. In that way, the volume develops a decidedly different approach to critique than recent considerations of critique as post-critique (Felski) or those endebted to Frankfurt School thought and liberal theories of democracy. It is the first full-length research publication of the interdisciplinary research network Terra Critica"--.

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
  • Critique
  • Methods, Institutions, Politics
  • The Ends of Critique: Overview
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Part I: Visions of Critique
• Chapter 1: “After Humanism?”—Time and Transformation in Critical Thinking
  • Critical Conundrum
  • After Human(ism)
  • Re-Turning
  • Hope at the End of the World as “We” Know It?
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Chapter 2: The Most Difficult Task: On the Idea of an Impure Pure Nonviolence in Derrida
  • The Logic of the Gift in Given Time
  • The Impure Pure Gift: Counterfeit Money
  • The Most Difficult Task
  • On the Death Penalty
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Chapter 3: The Changeability of the World: Utopia and Critique
  • *
  • *
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Chapter 4: Seeking Intelligent Life in the Time of COVID-19, or, Thinking “Epicritically”: (For Stan Robinson)
  • Whose Limits?
  • This Strange Critical Entity
  • New Logi(isti)cs of Critique
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Part II: Critical Reading
• Chapter 5: Suspicious Minds: Critique as Symptomatic Reading
  • ***
  • From Reading Symptoms to Uncritical Description
  • Derrida and Wynter: From Rereading to Rewriting
  • ***
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Chapter 6: The Ends of Critical Intimacy: Spivak, Fanon, and Appropriative Reading
  • Refrain from Appropriation. Reading as Aesthetic Education
  • ***
    • Appropriative Reading: Spivak Reading Fanon Reading Hegel
  • Thwarting Governing Fictions
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Chapter 7: Critical Vivisection: Transforming Ethical Sensibilities
  • Vivisection, Literal and Metaphorical
  • A Novel Experiment
  • Engaging with Ethical Sensibility
  • The Ends of Critique
  • Bibliography
• Part III: Institutions and Technologies
• Chapter 8: Unwinding the Abstraction of Whiteness
  • ***
  • An Origin Story
  • An Early Twentieth-Century American Cautionary Tale
  • Worshipping “Dog”
  • From “God” to “Dog”
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Chapter 9: How Not to Be Governed Like That by Our Digital Technologies
  • ***
  • “Like That and at That Cost”
  • “To Be Governed”
  • “By Our Digital Technologies”
  • “Not”
  • “How”
  • Uncomfortable Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Chapter 10: Defective Institutions: or, Critique
  • ***
  • From Critical Act to Political Substance?
  • A Brief for Falsification
  • A Brief for Failures
  • The Operator of Defection
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
• Index
• About the Contributors